Thunderstone Returns

This isn’t an expansion, but a whole new base set. Featuring completely redone card designs, new cards, a new game board for the village and dungeon and some improved rule booklets. The game now apparently incorporates a storyline, it remains to be seen how this works

I’m not the biggest Thunderstone fan. By rights it should be 100% in my sweet spot – I like deckbuilding games and I’m a sucker for anything with a fantasy theme. I’ve played it a few times and it’s always felt like it quickly reduced down to a boring maths exercise, and the total lack of player interaction ruined it for me. You might as well be playing a solo game. I own the base set and the Wrath of the Elements expansion, so I’ve tried to get into it, I really have.

This leaves me very much in two minds about this new set. I like that they’ve acknowledged the old card design & layout was atrocious, and are fixing it (see the new cards previewed here and here) plus I like the idea of a board. On the other hand, I can picture that mixing this set with the old expansions is going to look messy, with the mix of different card designs. But the big problem for me is – they’ve already done a revamp of the base set once already with the Dragonspire expansion. Dragonspire replaced many of the base cards with new art and included a board (just for the dungeon, not the village)